Copying libraries from one version of R to another (was Re: MikTeX will be assumed in R 2.2.0 in Windows)

On 9/9/05, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:

I've just committed some changes to allow R to be built and to use
MikTeX without needing the Rd.sty files to be installed to localtexmf.
Unfortunately, the changes are not compatible with other TeX packages,
so if you're not using MikTeX you'll need to edit a couple of the config
files (or set an environment variable).

I'd appreciate hearing of any problems during the alpha or beta test period.

A binary build containing the changes should be on CRAN tomorrow or the
next day.  Look for revision 35546 or higher.

The above improvement was one of the key things one had to look out
for in installing R that was not already covered in the R setup procedure.

The other one is to copy the libraries from your old R version to your
new one (unless you want to share libraries among versions).  I have
a batch file in the devel version of batchfiles to do that but if this were
made part of the installation procedure I could eliminate it or if it
were included it would be much less necessary.

I've just committed a change to the installer that partially addresses 
this.  Now, when a user does an install, the installer records the 
version number and path in the registry.  This way you can have multiple 
versions installed at once and there's a well-defined way to find them. 
  (Well, there will be as soon as we've had time to release multiple 
versions that do this.)

There's also a bit more help for non-admins to do
installs.  So an admin who installs just one copy of R will have
something like this in their registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\R-core]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\R-core\R]
"InstallPath"="F:\\R\\R-2.2.0alpha"
"Current Version"="2.2.0 alpha"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\R-core\R\2.2.0 alpha]
"InstallPath"="F:\\R\\R-2.2.0alpha"

while a non-admin will get just this:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\R-core]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\R-core\R]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\R-core\R\2.2.0 alpha]
"InstallPath"="C:\\Documents and Settings\\test\\My
Documents\\R\\R-2.2.0alpha"

If you want to see previously installed versions, you should search 
through HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\R-core\R and 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\R-core\R to see what's there.

This went in to revision 35562 a few minutes ago; I'm not sure how long 
it will take to propagate to the alpha tarball and to the build on CRAN.

Duncan Murdoch